THE BYTE IS IN MY BLOOD - 2007, Infidel Records

When The Well Runs Dry
What will you do when the well runs dry? Would you steal what you could from the state? Would you steal from your friends? You can't know how you would act in your darkest hour. You don't know what you could do if you were desperate enough. 'Cause when the stakes climb so high that they blot out the sun and leave us wandering 'round in a night so black that we lose sight of any and all reason, rationalizations make the ends justify the means. Can you remember the life you lived, back before this draught came on, ya before the well ran dry? You can't know how you would act in your darkest hour. You don't know what you could do if you were desperate enough. So as you leaf through the pages of history, let your stomach churn but don't turn up your nose, 'cause we're not so different from the participants in atrocities past. So don't tell yourself it could never happen here!

What All The Screaming's About
"'Once I was happy, then I was upset, and later on I felt alright again.' In show biz that's what they call a continuity error. I could make up some shit to cover it, go on for 20 minutes about what it signified, but I won't, I'll call it what it was: a mistake. Yeah I made a mistake, a simple oversight that could have been avoided if I'd been paying closer attention." // CHORUS: The days are gone when one could sing about the railroads. Yeah the time is past when one could sing about the West. And soon it will become too late to sing about emotions; yeah soon we'll have forgotten what it is to feel. // Replacing humans with machines is nothing new I'm afraid. We can see its mechanized fruits all around us... But this is something different, a more powerful idea: making human beings into machines, replacing feelings with little white pills, cause robots never need to get holidays. We need time for ourselves... // CHORUS // So you see that's what this screaming's about: not anger but unbridled emotion, unplugging from the wall and dancing the dance that we feeling in our hearts. So take the microphone and scream your song. Yeah grab the mic and scream your song!

Seeing Green
I found the idea for this song at the bottom of a dumpster along with a book on conservation and a bottle of shampoo. Seems like someone hadn't been doing their reading... I saw a heart sunk into the pavement, and floating in it was a cigarette butt. I thought to myself "Oh, that's nice. The city loves to throw away." We throw away our hearts. We throw away our minds. We throw away our time. We throw away our lives. Our hearts, our minds, our time, our lives are gone. I found true love on the dance floor you know, and they sell true love in the drugstore I hear. I saw two lips in the mirror today and I felt two lips when I kissed her last night. But what's the connection? I don't know what this means. Please can you tell me what this all should mean? This confusion that I'm feeling is us drowning [We're gasping for air as their pictures fill our lungs]; not drowning in our drunkenness, but drowning in conditioner [The images we're shown, not like anything we've known]. We learned to buy conditioner and rub it deep in our scalps [Can you feel is seeping down through your skin into your brain?] until everything we see is tinged a sickly green. We buy and sell our hearts. We buy and sell our minds. We buy and sell our time. We buy and sell our lives. Our hearts, our minds, our time, our lives are gone.

The Minivan Diaries
Have you ever found yourself studying the heart, and realized that the way you live your life is so unhealthy? Have you ever found yourself admiring the tress, and realized each and every day you drive your van to work? // CHORUS: How is the way I live my life so far from what's in my head? Listening you'd have to wonder if I'd ever heard a single word I'd said. // How could I not have heard a single word I'd said? And the obvious next question that I'm sure you're thinking is: If I'm not using my ears then why the hell am I  running my mouth? CHORUS. But it's not that simple, the problem's not my ears – it's the connection from my head to my hands and what they do, cause the distance is always infinite from your life to the shelf where your ideals sit. Failing to live up marks both the idealist and the hypocrite... Where do you draw the line between the idealist and the hypocrite? What am I at the end of the day, an idealist or a hypocrite? I don't know... Which brings us back to the surprising heart, the ever-pumping mystery that keeps this beat going. See, I'm not talking to hear my own voice, I'm singing to feel myself breath! 

Zen And The Science Of Nihilism
Drew a black dot in the center of my palm and I was visited by the face of divinity dressed to kill in its six-sided form. Can you see the row-sham-bow that Darwin tattooed on your skin? I bet you think you can but you're obviously wrong, or you wouldn't be using protection, now would you? // CHORUS: So I burn this song as a tribute to my gods: chance and the span of four billion years. Science as religion I'm a man of the cloth: Logic and reason like the flame and the moth. Your brain is just a beautiful machine forever calculating nothing. So here's a koan for the modern age: How many rolls of the endless-sided die did it take to make a reason why? // Saw a squirrel by the base of a tree and it struck me powerfully how stupid and pointless life is. I know that's melodramatic but its true. All of our ideas about what's important are merely self-delusions. A biologist might say that sex really matters, but even that's not true cause who cares if your genes get passed on?  So on the lawn of my parents' house I found nihilism - who cares what it means? CHORUS. But I'm still looking for a job and writing this song, 'cause after all, it doesn't matter that it doesn't matter. In light of this, here's another question with no answer: What will you do tomorrow?

01001101 (Failing The Turing Test)
"I can no longer think what I want to think. My thoughts have been replaced by moving images." (Alexander Duhamel, 1930) We've seen half this country but it's all been air-conditioned, rolling by through tinted glass. // CHORUS: Ever am I realizing how thickly the byte is in my blood, crawling under my skin and digging like a chigger. If I was a Luddite, I'd have to learn to live without myself. If I was a Luddite, I'd try to destroy myself. Where do people like me fit into the world of Small Is Beautiful (E. F. Schumacher, 1974)? //  Just another place in my thought-space where the idea goes down more easily than the instantiation. I can talk the talk, yeah I can get excited, but if I'm really honest with myself I'll see that the times when I am truly happy, when the excitement is bubbling and overflowing, these times are few and far between and happen almost exclusively alone with my computer in the middle of the night. // CHORUS // I ask myself "What makes me truly happy?", and the half-answer I get are suspect. I can't tell how much is "I can make a convincing argument for why this should make me happy", and how much is "This really makes me happy!" What really makes me happy? I've been working on a computer program to tell us what is beautiful. I think it's time to pull the plug...

Wake Up
Wake up you're buried in the sand and the seagull has landed. Now's the time, get your head in the air, get your feet in the air, get your hands in the air! Grab ahold of the thing with the wings, love it learn it and live it, but be sure not to leave it... And don't let it leave you by leaving your head in the sand. Claim your life - the personal is political. A feeling a safety, a feeling of comfort, and your ass flying high in the air. Take a look, have a good laugh, and then let's get real. We've got a lot of work to do, work to do together, if we want our lives to live. For years it's been divide divide divide 'til its only one, and one times one times one times one still only equals one. Isolated, alienated, where we are is where we stay...

Better Living Through Nanotechnology
Today I found hope and inspiration in the most unlikely of places: nestled in the pages of a tech magazine lying open a table at the office. Science to the rescue like a sci-fi film from days gone by. Do you know what photo-voltaics means? No? Well neither did I... Harvesting energy from the sun much better than ever before, nanotech opens the door to a life that's free from oil. Solar power feasible for the first time on a global scale. Do you know what photo-voltaics means? No? Well neither did I... And now that I do, I've glimpsed a possibility, a chance that we might learn to save our selves, that we might yet learn to live responsibly, renewably, sustainably. 

I'm Holding A Burning Match
You buried your trail deep under thousands of pages of fine print, thinking we'd never find it wrapped up tight in miles of red tape, thinking that no one reads before they sign anymore. But we read, you know we read, we read and now you're fuckin' dead! It took years just to find the fault, to realize that there was something wrong inside. // CHORUS: I couldn't sleep so I went to the library. I brought my shovel. I followed the dotted line to the X on the map in my head. I dug deep and I found the bones, so now we know the truth: it was you, you broke my heart! // ...and the hearts of millions more out there like me. Now how will we rebuild this ruined flaming mess that once was a perfect world before you laid your plans? How dare you waste our earth and lives?! You broke my fucking heart! It took years of self-examination to find the fault, the tire tracks through our subconscious, but once we'd found the trail it was as good as over. There'd be no rest 'til we had answers. // CHORUS // We traced the route backwards from our heads to your office, laying a trail of coarse black powder back to the keg under your desk. I'm holding a match. It's lit. It's over



Not on THE BYTE IS IN MY BLOOD Re-issue:

Monument To The (N+1)th International
Today as I walked down the hallways of my old house, I was feeling sentimental so I took my glasses off, and then all of a sudden, what a surprise: it looked strikingly like my new house. You know, it's like they say: The more things change... I don't know if I find walking these circles discouraging or if they offer me a source of solace because it's good to know the past rides with you, but at the same time I can't help but notice that we're back where they began. Maybe things could change... Maybe we could say // CHORUS: "It sounds familiar but I can't quite place it" - that's the cyclic sound of change. The results are breathtaking, the process threatening, and it scares me to death. // But even then, this carbon atom in my brain that once was an ancestor and a part of Primo's period (The Periodic Table, Levi 1984) will become a guitar and a drop of blood. You know, everything's new around here and has been for some time. Can you name that tune... .